1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention relates to computerized medical diagnostic systems. More particularly, embodiments of the present invention relate to a computerized system for time-based diagnosis of a patient""s medical complaint by use of dynamic data structures.
2. Description of the Related Technology
Health care costs currently represent a significant portion of the United States Gross National Product and are generally rising faster than any other component of the Consumer Price Index. Moreover, usually because of an inability to pay for medical services, many people are deprived of access to even the most basic medical care and information.
Many people delay in obtaining, or are prevented from seeking, medical attention because of cost, time constraints, or inconvenience. If the public had universal, unrestricted, and easy access to medical information, many diseases could be prevented. Likewise, the early detection and treatment of numerous diseases could keep many patients from reaching the advanced stages of illness, the treatment of which is a significant part of the financial burden attributed to our nation""s health care system. It is clear that the United States is facing health-related issues of enormous proportions and that present solutions are not robust.
Previous attempts at tackling the healthcare problem have involved various forms of automation. Some of these attempts have been in the form of a dial-in library of answers to medical questions. Other attempts have targeted providing doctors with computerized aids for use during a patient examination. These methods involve static procedures or algorithms. What is desired is an automated way of providing to a patient medical advice and diagnosis that is quick, efficient and accurate. Such a medical advice system should be modular to allow expansion for new types of medical problems or methods of detection.
Structure-based processing is a method of diagnosing diseases that works by arranging diseases, symptoms, and questions into a set of related disease, symptom, and question structures, such as objects or lists, in such a way that the structures can be processed to generate a dialogue with a patient. Each question to the patient generates one of a set of defined responses, and each response generates one of a set of defined questions. This establishes a dialogue that elicits symptoms from the patient. The symptoms are processed and weighted to rule diseases in or out. The set of ruled-in diseases establishes the diagnosis. A structure-based processing system organizes medical knowledge into formal structures and then executes those structures on a structure engine, such as a list-based engine, to automatically select the next question. The responses to the questions lead to more questions and ultimately to a diagnosis.
An additional aspect of the invention includes a computerized medical diagnosis system, comprising a) means for defining a spectrum of terms representative of a subjective description for an aspect of a medical symptom; b) means for presenting the spectrum of terms to a patient during a diagnosis session; c) means for selecting a term from among the spectrum of terms; d) means for repeating a)-c) for other aspects of the medical symptom; e) means for encoding the selected terms; and f) means for indexing a database of diseases with the encoded terms thereby diagnosing a disease.
An additional aspect of the invention includes a computerized medical diagnosis system, comprising a) means for defining a spectrum of terms representative of a subjective description for a selected aspect of a medical symptom; b) means for defining diagnostic weights for each term of the spectrum; c) means for presenting the spectrum of terms to a patient during a diagnostic consultation; d) means for receiving a selected term from among the spectrum of terms; e) means for corresponding the selected term to a weight; f) means for applying the weight corresponding to the selected term to a diagnostic score so as to diagnose a medical condition; g) means for repeating the acts a)-f) for other aspects of the medical symptom so as to receive other selected terms; and h) means for encoding the selected terms into a code.
An additional aspect of the invention includes a method of developing a data structure of aspects of a medical symptom for use in diagnosis of medical conditions, the method comprising identifying a plurality of aspects of a particular medical symptom; defining a spectrum of terms for each aspect of the plurality of aspects; assigning a corresponding diagnostic weight for each term of each spectrum of terms; and storing the aspects, the spectrum of terms for each aspect and the corresponding diagnostic weights in a data structure for use in diagnosis of diseases associated with the medical symptom.
Yet an additional aspect of the invention includes a computerized medical diagnosis system, comprising a computerized device; a data structure for a spectrum of terms representative of a subjective description for each of a plurality of selected aspects of a medical symptom, wherein each aspect has a different spectrum of terms and wherein each term of the spectrum has a corresponding diagnostic weight; and a diagnosis program configured, during a diagnostic consultation, to: a) present a spectrum of terms for one aspect of the medical symptom to a patient, b) receive a selected term from among the spectrum of terms, c) apply a weight from the data structure corresponding to the selected term to a diagnostic score so as to diagnose a medical condition, d) repeat a)-c) for other aspects of the medical symptom so as to receive other selected terms, and e) encode the selected terms into a code.